Thinkpads Forum

hey, i've bought an X301 a month ago. According to the reviews on the internet, X301 is supposed to be really cool and quiet. However, my one happens to get quite hot as soon as it boots up, and the fan just spins none stop. I wonder that's the case for others. If not, what can I do about it?

My fan also spins a majority of the time as well.

It's designed that way -- the laptop is so thin that there isn't much of a heatsink there and so a fan is required to run to keep the processor cool.

But when I am using it I never hear it running, so I can't complain.

Well indeed the fan is pretty quiet. I just thought a CPU like U9400 would be a bit cooler, you could be right about the slim size factor. In this respect, X301 is way better than Macbook Air lol

I have a SU9600 and it doesn't get hot, but the fan definitely starts up after a while. I'd check to make sure that the CPU throttling is set to 'adaptive' instead of 'maximum performance'. I think (not that familiar with anything > Pentium-M) this allows the dynamic frequency to be chosen by the CPU itself.

Give that a try and see if it cools down a bit.

I have the X300 and was very bothered by the fan spinning at 5000 rpm. I hope that's improved in the X301! What I've done is select a power profile where CPU speed is dynamically adjusted, and then I'm using TPFanControl to keep the fan spinning 2000 rpm most of the time. Occasionally it increases to 5000 rpm, but only momentarily, except if its heavily loaded.

My X301 (with SSD) is still louder than my T60 (with a magnetic hard drive) because the fan in the X301's is louder than the T60's fan + the T60's Hitachi 7k200 hard drive combined. Is that normal?

Also, AFAICT, the fan on the X301 runs all the time in Vista with Aero turned on. I was surprised by that.

However, the X301 does stay cooler than the T60 and is much cooler than my Vaio S660P.

The fan on my X301 (with SSD) ran all the time as well. I checked various forums and seems like this is a common thing. And also that the fan on X301 is louder than some other models, I noticed my W700 (with QX9300) ran quieter than X301.